More and less of the Pater Unfamilias

Concertina Man

Unlike the story I told my son Jamie, his The Pater Unfamilias [PU] did not come from a safety-deposit box in a sperm bank in St Augustine, Florida, a disappointing, geriatric city I've visited just once and not for purposes of spermination but rather to gather with my clan to perform an intervention on my late, then 82 year old great uncle, Corny [Cornelius], who'd started leaving $500 tips for bartenders at some of the town's sadder watering holes.

The real PU is the man you see pictured at right.

Kidding, just a bit of jocose lying [for the three kinds of Catholic lies: see http://tinyurl.com/4854nb5. It's an often useful prelude for lachrymose truth.

The real PU is a considerably more complicated man whereas the fellow to the right is an accurate representation of the YX chromosomal combination who formed my inchoate, early pubescent eroto-romantic fantasies, fantasies ignited by his show-stealing performance at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow's Spring Talent Contest ca. 1964. He played Herman's Hermits' "Something Tells Me I'm Into Something Good"on the concertina.

The real father doesn't play the concertina. He plays--he played-- the harpsichord.

I was writing a dissertation on the Pre-Raphaelites; he was a collector of Victorian prints and drawings in a city on another continent which would not be difficult to guess. He was not unmarried.

The price for my silence was a gentleman's promise to pay the college education of his filias unfamilias. And a Rossetti sketch  for me that I might retire way early and move to nyc. Eighteen months ago the emails stopped. A stroke. Not fatal, except to my plans and my pocket, now full of mumbles, such are promises.

I read about his stroke in The Guardian.